Anthony Bourdain once said that the problem with being a chef is that you ruin restaurants.
You know too much.
You've been behind too many doors. You know that the bread they're charging $18 for was frozen this morning. You know the "house-made" sauce came out of a bag. You know the chef whose name is on the menu hasn't touched a pan in this kitchen in four years. You know what real stock smells like at 6am, what it costs to source the right fish, what it actually takes to make something that actually qualifies as culinary art.
So you sit in the dining room of somewhere that everyone else thinks is extraordinary — and you can't unknow what you know. The couple next to you are having the best meal of their year. The food critic gave it three stars. The Instagram comments are unhinged with praise.
And you're sitting there tasting the shortcuts.
Not because you're a snob. Not because nothing can ever be good enough. But because once you've been in enough real kitchens, once you've tasted when something is actually done right — the gap between that and what's being celebrated becomes impossible to unsee.
And there's a particular kind of loneliness in that gap. The loneliness of knowing exactly what's missing and being the only one at the table who can taste it.
That's a bit like what growing into yourself feels like.
Anyone who's made a sincere, unreasonable commitment to their own growth — who's done enough real work to know the difference between transformation and a good weekend — starts to develop a very specific palate. You start to taste the shortcuts. You start to feel the gap between what you know is actually true and real and worth building, and what everyone else is losing their minds over on the internet this week.
And then you start to wonder if you're the only one who can taste it. The people closest to you are wonderful. They love you. They're trying. But they're not quite there — not at the altitude where the dream actually lives.
And so you stop saying certain things out loud. You start editing the vision down before it leaves your mouth. You get used to a low hum of loneliness that you've just quietly accepted as the cost of becoming.
So you go looking for your people.
You join the mastermind. The one with the testimonials and the alumni photos and the promise of "a high-level community of like-minded entrepreneurs." You show up. You do the thing.
And somewhere around week three you realize that most people in the room are performing the version of themselves they think belongs there — and you recognize it immediately because you've done it too.
The vulnerability is curated. The ambition is cosplaying. The conversations are about what's supposed to be inspiring: the scaling, the ad strategy, the messaging, the mental reframes. And it still feels like nobody is saying the actual THING.
You try the spiritual community. Surely here — among the heart-centered, the open, the people who've done The Work™ — you'll find your people.
And you find beautiful humans who have done ayahuasca seventeen times, collected ego deaths like Pokémon cards, can cite every Rumi poem and quote every Gabor Maté interview, and have somehow, mysteriously, not changed a single concrete thing about their lives after each next big insight. The integration never quite happens. The downloads keep coming. The life stays the same.
You spend more time in the online space, convinced that your people are out there somewhere — posting, engaging, building in public — and instead you find an industry that has turned genuine transformation into aesthetic. Everyone has a framework. Everyone has a signature method. Everyone is performing depth while quietly optimizing for reach.
And the worst part isn't that it's fake. Most of it isn't fake.
It's that it's almost right.
Close enough to make you keep looking. Not close enough to actually land. It's all frozen sauce in a plastic bag.
You start to wonder if the sense of home you're looking for — the squad that dreams at the same altitude, that doesn't need you to explain yourself, that makes you feel less like a weirdo and more like you finally found your species — maybe that just doesn't exist yet.
I recently fell in love. And my partner did what most lovergirls who are really, really into astrology do — she read our charts and used the stars and planets to psychoanalyze me.
She pointed out that my placement of Chiron (I think it's an asteroid?) showed that I have a very specific "core wound" around community and belonging. That the dharma, the very purpose of my life was specifically around healing this wound by building community and creating places of belonging.
So for a hot second I genuinely entertained the idea that an astrological curse was the reason I was so hell-bent on building my business around community. That a space rock being at a certain place in the cosmos at the exact moment I was born was the reason I felt so utterly alien and unrelatable. That the stars meant I was cosmically ordained to be alone in feeling alone.
And then I thought — nah. This isn't a Chiron thing. This is just a people thing that nobody in the industry coaching industry or "spiritual space" has bothered to actually solve.
Because how many memes have you seen about the male loneliness epidemic? How many bleeding hearts have prattled on about how social media has made us "more connected and yet more isolated than ever" like they're dropping an original observation? The think pieces. The TED talks. The LinkedIn posts about "authentic connection" written by people you would probably never text back.
And when I started talking to more and more coaches, healers, leaders — ambitious people genuinely trying to build something significant that could actually help — their biggest pain point wasn't their ROAS. It wasn't an Instagram strategy to go viral. It wasn't the perfect objection reframe on discovery calls.
It was that they felt completely, profoundly alone in it. And that nobody got it.
We're all together in feeling alone.
Here's something I've noticed about my own life.
Every time I've wanted something that didn't exist yet — I've just decided to go build it myself.
My community, QX Coaches, started because I couldn't find the community I actually wanted to be in.
Not a community that was willing to hustle and grind themselves into the ground to feed their seven-figure scaling sickness.
Not a community that treated "mindset work" as rebranded "just believe in yourself harder" — now with 40% more nervous system vocabulary and a somatic explanation for why you're still not doing the thing.
Not another group of otherwise intelligent people who had completely unironically drunk the Kool-Aid that more money, faster, at any cost, was the whole point of the game.
Not a community that had collectively decided that if you just manifested hard enough, microdosed consistently enough, and kept the vibes high enough — the business would sort itself out.
I wanted to be around coaches and leaders who understood that the business was never the whole point — that financial growth meant nothing if the rest of your life was quietly assembling a case against you. People who understood that your nervous system, your relationships, your body, your faith, your sense of meaning — these weren't soft extras you got to tend to once you hit the revenue goal. They were the whole thing.
The financial piece too — but in its right place. As a vehicle. Not a destination. Not a personality.
So I built it. The curriculum was everything I knew, plus everything I'd paid offensive amounts of money to other programs to learn — minus the filler, the fluff, and the three bonus modules that existed because someone somewhere decided that more meant better.
QX is full of people I actually want to hang out with. That was the whole point. We made the home we couldn't find anywhere else. We stopped lone-wolfing our dreams in isolation and built something that actually felt like belonging.
And it works. Genuinely. The community is real, the relationships are real, the growth is real. We laugh, we meme, we cry, we have our inside jokes. We're a quirky little family, and I fkin love it.
But here's what I've learned about online community — even the good kind, even the kind you built from scratch because nothing else existed:
there is a limit on what can happen through a screen.
You can find your people on Zoom. You can feel seen in a group chat. You can have conversations that actually matter in a community call.
Zoom is incredible. Zoom is also where you go to half-attend something while folding laundry and covertly checking your Instagram notifications. There's a specific kind of magic that only happens when you can actually hug the person, look them in the non-pixelated eyes (not secretly spend the whole call looking at your own face in the corner), and feel what it's like to be in the same physical space as someone who actually gets it.
That doesn't compress into a grid view.
I wanted to gather the Avengers IRL. I wanted to gather my people scattered across the globe and put them together in one of the most extraordinary places on earth and see what happened when there was no screen between them and the dream.
Nothing existed for that yet.
So I did what I do: I created it.
Imagine this:
You wake up at 9,000 feet above sea level in a bohemian riverside property in the mountains of Pisac, in the Sacred Valley of Peru. The air is different up here. Your email feels genuinely, physically far away. The version of you that has been white-knuckling the dream gets to put it down for a second.
Breakfast is on the table — made with the kind of fresh, local ingredients that make you realize you've been eating a polite simulation of food your entire life.
You're sitting across from someone who built something really fucking cool, who gets it without you having to test the waters first, who you can say the actual thing to without bracing for "the fluoride stare". The conversation that starts over coffee is still going two hours later and nobody checked their phone once.
You're in a hot seat being absolutely grilled — and you love it. Because at some point you'd started quietly grieving something you didn't want to admit: that you'd outgrown the coaching you could find. That you could sit in the $10,000 mastermind and already know what they were going to say before they said it. That you were too far down the road for the map everyone else was using. You'd stopped expecting to be surprised. You'd stopped expecting anyone to meet you where you actually were.
And now you're surrounded by people who are egging you on. To get bigger — no, BIGGER THAN THAT. And they tell you exactly how you'll make it happen. And then someone else adds to it. And then someone else. And something cracks open. The specific, electric, almost embarrassing aliveness of finally being in the presence of people whose vision of what's possible for you is bigger than your own.
You're doing deep, unconscious reprogramming. Not some "shadow work" cosplay... deep excavation with people who've gone deep enough themselves to know exactly where you are — and stay with you while you're there.
And on the other side is something you weren't fully prepared for. The specific disorientation of a story you've been unconsciously organizing your entire life around just... not being there anymore. The thing that's been quietly capping every decision, every ask, every moment you almost went for it — gone. Not reframed. Not managed. Not given a cuter name. Dissolved. And you're sitting there thinking — "Holy shit, I've been dragging that around for twelve years and it VANISHED in an hour."
You're walking through Cusco — cobblestone streets, markets overflowing with more varieties of potato than you knew existed, ceviche that's cold and acid and alive in a way that makes you understand why Peruvians are not taking culinary advice from anyone. Standing at sites that were holding transformation for thousands of years before the coaching industry existed and will be holding it thousands of years after the algorithm has moved on to whatever comes after short form video.
You're around the fire at 2am and you're laughing — really laughing — and someone is crying happy tears and someone else just said something that made the whole group go silent for a second before everyone started talking at once because the idea was too good to wait. The kind of night that fills something you forgot was empty. The kind you'll still be talking about in five years.
And somewhere in the middle of the week — not on a schedule, not as a deliverable — you notice that the low hum of loneliness you'd quietly accepted as the "cost of becoming" isn't there anymore.
THAT'S the shit I want to be up to. THOSE are the people I want to roll with.
How about you?
These are the Dharma Daddies and Baddies. Your people. The ones who are done playing at the size everyone else is comfortable with. Who stopped waiting for permission somewhere along the way and just started building. Who have already proven they can do it — and are ready to find out what happens when they stop doing it alone.
I built this retreat for them. Because these are the experiences I want to have. This is the work I want to do. And frankly, these are the only kind of people I want to be in Peru with.
Which is why I created the God-Sized Dream Retreat. May 6–12. Sacred Valley, Peru.
And here are a few Daddies n' Baddies who are already coming:
- Sol, who outgrew her six figure launches and is ready to stop having a personal brand and start leading a movement.
- Brooke, who's done delivering other people's methodologies and is ready to coin her own — certify others in it, take it global, build the retreats and events that put her work on the world stage.
- Alicia, sitting on millions of dollars of investment capital to develop international retreat centers and use the revenue to actually revolutionize healthcare — not disrupt it, not optimize it, revolutionize it.
- Robbie, who built his fitness business for firefighters so well it runs completely without him — sales teams, trained coaches, his entire modality replicated — and knows that he's ready to have an even bigger impact on first responders' well being.
The God-Sized Dream Retreat is 7 days in one of the most extraordinary places on earth — Sacred Valley, Peru, May 6–12 — and you're going to leave with four things you've been missing:
a dream at full size that you're no longer editing down for anyone, a model and systems to actually build it, the clarity of knowing exactly how you'll make it happen, and a community of people who were always supposed to be beside you while you do.
(Plus Peru. Which, it turns out, is an absolutely unhinged place to have the most important week of your professional life.)
8 spots. If this is your people — one of them is yours.
